The background: Not that there are many tickets left, but if you want to take a chance and you fancy a night of wildly diverse R&B and pop, rock and rampant acoustica, you could do a lot worse than pop down to Camden tonight for our second New Band of the Day gig at the Barfly, where you will be entertained by BIGKids, Angel, Josh Kumra, Pixie Geldof's Violet and Michele Stodart, with whom you may be familiar with from her work with the Magic Numbers.

She's gone solo now, perhaps as a temporary respite from the rigours of spending all day, every day, cooped up in a tour van with her brother. We have no idea, and frankly, it's none of our business, although we fully intend to ask her when we see her later. But mainly we will be enjoying her music – that is, when we're not wincing at the more painfully intimate moments, hoping it won't feel as though we're intruding on someone's private grief. Because that's what a lot of her songs are like – diary entries written by a woman at her most heartbroken and alone, angry and upset. "When you kiss me, why does it feel so cold?" she wonders on Foolish Love, one of just a few tracks we've heard from her self-produced debut album, Wide-Eyed Crossing, recorded with engineer Phil Brown (Talk Talk, Beth Gibbons, Joni Mitchell). It's a good question, one that has been asked before, most poignantly by Ian Curtis, but it's the framing of the enquiry that makes it work so well: the music manages to be both tuneful and mournful, jaunty yet sad. What a combo, one that never fails to deliver.

Meanwhile, Stodart's voice is suggestive of quiet resignation and regret, bearing traces of folk, country and soul – you can tell she grew up listening to and loving Patsy Cline. There's a kick to it, too: "I hope you feel this same pain one day soon." Ouch. On My Baby, My Sweet the voice is husky, and her acoustic plucking is neat until the arrangement swells to something more mighty and, well, Bacharachian. Again, it's the candour that counts. "Come save me," she sings, ahead of a pause so long you could lie in it, "from me." List of Don'ts is as lilting as a lullaby, but it – and the voice and lyrics – bite. This is no winsome waif. Take Your Loving Back is twinklingly lovely, and approximates the infinite universe of sorrow expressed by Tracy Thorn on A Distant Shore, our all-time favourite grief-striken girl-with-a-guitar album. Maybe she can bring us a copy of her CD along tonight. Michele?